Pharast 5 (Spirit Road, Late Night)
I
feel naked without my hair.
Dasi and I are making the trip to Muliwan tomorrow, and that means I spent hours tonight working on my disguise with Ameiko, Radella, and Dasi. The easy part is looking like a monk of Irori: we almost always visited the temple when we traveled to Magnimar, and of course, the time we spent in Jalmeray would qualify as “immersive”. The hard part is acting like one.
My clumsy attempts at being someone I wasn’t back in Kalsgard weighed heavily on me as I practiced, over and over, under the rising Rebirth Moon. I could hear Sandru’s voice in my head: it isn’t enough to know Irori’s faith. I’m not going to be quizzed on his tenets. I need to be someone that meets people’s expectations. This includes everything from attitude to speech patterns to gods-be-damned posture.
“Normally, when creating a disguise, you don’t want to stand out. You want to be forgettable,” Ameiko explained as I dressed in the outfit I’d fabricated. “In your case, however, you can’t not stand out, so you have to become someone that stands out for a completely different reason. It’s…a lot harder to pull off.” And that was the problem. Absolutely nothing about me had to be like me.
Dasi and I constructed a simple story for why we were traveling together. This is harder than it sounds because we had to be able to talk about where we were from, how we met, what we were doing together, and on and on. It took half an hour to develop our “history” to the point where we could answer any questions the others in our group threw at us.
We are as ready as we’ll ever be.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. But, good news, thanks to the ring, I can fret about it virtually all night long.
Pharast 6 (Spirit Road, Evening)
A
mazingly, we made it down to Muliwan and back without incident.
Miyaro came up to me in the morning and asked me why I had cut off all of my hair. I know she hasn’t exactly spent a lot of time around humanoid settlements, but…I thought what we were doing was pretty obvious.
“I need to not be recognizable in Muliwan, just in case agents of the Five Storms or Prince Batsaikhar are watching for us. My long hair would give me away.”
This seemed to amuse her. “Subterfuge,” she said, smiling broadly. “I approve.”
She also pointed out her hair, which now had streaks of white and orange in it. Streaks that weren’t there the night before. “What do you think?” she asked.
“It’s lovely!” I said. Though I am a little confused about how she did it.
I didn’t have time to get into a discussion, though, as Dasi and I were getting ready to leave. We wanted to be back by dinner time.
Dasi and I talked a lot on the way down. Or rather, he asked me a lot of questions, and I answered them. I learned that Dasi doesn’t like to talk about himself, though he’ll happily talk your ear off about what he does, which is write music, write poems, and research the nobility of Tian Xia in general and Minkai specifically. The most I got about his background was that his mother is an elven performer of some sort, and his father is a warrior or samurai or something. He was raised by his father, which was clearly the only personal information he was willing to share.
Honestly, I don’t really mind the secrecy. He’s still not quite sure what he’s gotten into. You don’t just open up to strangers.
Most of his questions at first were around Varisia and Varisian culture. He wanted to know how Shelyn is worshipped along the Inner Sea, and how it differs from worship in Tian Xia (the answer to which can be summed up as “not much”). He also asked what I knew of the Minkai nobility (the answer to which can also be summed up as “not much”). Eventually, though, he got around to what I knew about Ameiko.
“I grew up with her,” I said. “We were close friends, maybe even best friends, for several years.”
His entire demeanor seemed to change right then. “What was that like? What was she like?” he asked, clearly excited.
So I told him.
My family moved to Sandpoint when I was six. It’s a small town in Varisia, the kind where everyone knows everyone, you know? Except, of course, I didn’t know anyone when we first got there.
Ameiko and I…we just sort of gravitated towards one another. I was obviously a foreigner, and she was a foreigner, too, and we were both girls, and about the same age. It seemed natural that we’d hang out together. Over time, we became pretty close friends. And she was a good friend. Much better than I was to her.
Have you ever been bullied, Dasi? I didn’t think so. I was. I was a small child. Much smaller than other girls my age. I fell seriously ill when I was a toddler, and that illness, as a physicker would say, stunted my growth. Magic can heal injuries, cure diseases, even raise the dead, but there are things it can’t undo. So I was small, a foreigner, a girl, not particularly sociable, and not at all intimidating. Just the opposite, really. And that made me an easy target. And on top of that, I had a temper, which made their job that much easier.
Ameiko stood beside me through those years. She was there to listen, to help, to offer solace, and when things turned violent, to teach me how to protect myself. And the thing is…I didn’t really deserve it.
No, of course I didn’t deserve to be harassed and beaten, either. No one does. But my friends didn’t deserve how I treated them. Especially Ameiko. When you are bruised enough, you lash out at people, including those you love. Yet, as awful as I could be to Ameiko, she still stood beside me. But it’s not just that she helped: it’s how she helped. I wanted to fight back, to hurt the people that were hurting me. But Ameiko wouldn’t have that. She taught me to avoid fights, not to win them.
Yes, I know. I wasn’t big enough or strong enough to do the latter. It’s easy to blow off the significance of it like that. But that’s not why she did what she did. She wasn’t afraid I couldn’t fight back: she wanted me to be a better person than they were. That’s just who Ameiko is. She encourages the best in people.
Her family? No, Dasi, she didn’t learn compassion and human decency from her family. Well, perhaps from her mom, though even that was…complicated.
No. No one knows for sure how she died. The official story, the one told by her father, Lonjiku—which immediately makes it suspect, by the way—is that she fell from the cliffs behind their home. A tragic accident.
No one disputes that it was the fall that killed her, but how and why she went over that edge? That was a source of endless speculation for years.
How much has she told you about her family?
Of course not. Ameiko doesn’t talk about her family or her personal life. Don’t worry, though. Most of what I’m sharing with you now was widely known in Sandpoint, or at the very least an open secret, and the rest we reconstructed from what we learned after finding the Amatatsu Seal.
Her father, Lonjiku, was a bitter, angry and controlling man. We know now that he was a victim of the Five Storms, too. His father had hidden their true heritage from him, and when Lonjiku accidentally exposed the Seal, the family fled Brinewall. He survived the voyage south, but nearly everyone else he knew and loved did not.
His wife, Atsuii, believed he had died as well, and returned to an old elven lover. Lonjiku eventually made it to Sandpoint alive, and eight months later she gave birth to Tsuto, a half-elf.
Lonjiku never forgave either of them for it. Tsuto was raised outside their home, and the two of them hated one another for the rest of their lives.
Ameiko was born a year later. In time, Lonjiku would drive her away, too, because driving people away is what Lonjiku was good at.
Do I believe all this? I was ten or eleven the first time I was invited to Ameiko’s home for dinner. That was actually a rare event, Ameiko being allowed to have friends over. Lonjiku…I don’t think I’d go so far as to say he liked me—I don’t believe he truly liked anyone—but he certainly didn’t dislike me. Anyway, he spent much of the evening sniping at Ameiko and Atsuii. Ameiko was mortified. Atsuii was painfully silent. I was really uncomfortable and just wanted to leave. So, yes. I believe it. I think he hated his family. Sometimes I think I was invited to dinner that night just so he’d have an audience.
Anyway, Ameiko, of course, knew her half-brother. She tried on several occasions to reconcile the bad blood between Tsuto and her father. Her heart was always in the right place, of course, but Lonjiku didn’t have one, and Tsuto? He would rather be hated than loved. When Ameiko was thirteen, one of those attempts to clear the air ended disastrously. Tsuto actually struck her. She ran away to Magnimar the next day.
Oh, yes, she ran away from home. Twice, in fact. She was only gone for a few months that first time…but it was long enough to not be home when her mother died. She returned for the funeral, of course, but everything came to a head right then and there. Lonjiku couldn’t even keep the peace at a burial. There was an enormous fight between Ameiko, her father, and Tsuto. I think that’s when Tsuto outright accused Lonjiku of murdering Atsuii.
Ameiko lived at home with her father for the next couple of years out of a sense of…what? Family? Honor? Duty? But it didn’t last. Ameiko left again when she couldn’t take it anymore, this time to start an adventuring career.
No. Well, yes and no. It didn’t last long: she and Sandru were gone barely more than a year. Something happened out there. Something she doesn’t talk about. It made her…distant, even to me. So, no, I wouldn’t exactly call it a success, but she did earn enough money to buy an inn in Sandpoint, renovate it, and start her own business. So, that is something, right?
No, Lonjiku did not take this well. He saw it as a deliberate humiliation, and he did not even try to hide his feelings. He literally walked into her bar one night and—right in front of a room full of patrons—very loudly issued an ultimatum to her: come home with him or be cut out of the family. Guess which one she chose?
How did he die? Horribly. It was Tsuto that did it, that murdered him. He had gotten mixed up in a plot against the town and saw his chance to kill Lonjiku as part of it. So he did. He tried to kill Ameiko, too.
What happened to Tsuto?
Ameiko executed him.
We rode in silence for a half hour or so as he absorbed what he’d learned about Ameiko’s history. I don’t know what he was expecting, but it clearly wasn’t tragedy, betrayal, and familicide.
Kali Nassim: conversation killer. Thank you. I’ll be here all day.
I finally broke the silence. “She’s a good person, Dasi. Better than most.”
Muliwan was, as I said, uneventful. We sold the items that needed selling, bought what needed buying, and teleported back courtesy of yours truly. The only unexpected stop was to pick up a slab of pork belly.
“Ivan sent to me,” he said when I looked at him quizzically. “He wants bacon.”
I did my best to put on my “disgusted” face. I was playing a part, after all.
That was harder than it sounds. I really like bacon.
